Comparing FF6 and FF7 Data

The FF7 guide is coming along nicely, with almost everything done except for actually re-playing the game. Things are about to get crazy at work, so I’m going to try to finish this one soon, but we’ll see. I definitely want to make a guide for I am Setsuna, but I may need to put that off for quite a while.

In the meantime, while writing up all the data models for FF7, it struck me that FF6 had much more complicated data. This seems odd, because FF6 isn’t actually that complicated a game. I believe this is mostly due to FF6 having a dozen different types of abilities that all shared some basic structure. In FF7, you basically only have spells, and individual character abilities are covered by limit breaks. These are fewer in number than all the Blitzes, SwdTechs, and whatnot, and all function in the same basic way, so it cleans things up a bit.

Nonetheless, it has made me appreciate FF7 a bit more. The materia system allows enough complexity that they could surround it with relatively simple systems and the game still ends up being incredibly deep. I still have some issues with the balance of the materia system, which I’m sure I’ll post about some time later, but it does a good job of creating interesting mechanics without a bunch of convoluted systems.